I have been eager to take photos of Long-legged Buzzards for years but it is not so simple since these beautiful birds, according to their name, really prefer open, treeless areas where it is rather problematic to use a mobile photo hide successfully. Thus, I haven’t made any attempt until recently.
There are specimens in every species which are less bothered by the human presence than their conspecifics. This time I was lucky to take photos of an adult Long-legged Buzzard of such. It spent hours close to my hide carefully preening its plumage feather by feather. It was a perfect day, the illumination of the tree and the Buzzard changed very nicely during the day as the hue of the blue background did from royalblue to lightblue.
Many birds close their eyes during preening but this bird took its time and left closed its eyes after preening i.e. slept on the branch in front of me. I tried to do so more or less successfully in spite of my position in the hide I would not call comfortable…
An interesting moment was when I realized that I left my spare memory cards at home. It has never happened to me to date! Never mind, I asked my brother-in-law for bringing them to me if he had had any business on the way through Eger. I was lucky, it happened that Jóska could deliver my cards (thanks very much again!).
At that moment when I left the hide for picking up the cards the LL Buzzard was not on the tree but later I realized that it was watching me from a nearby tree. Since I had nothing to lose I decided to return to the hide while the bird was circling up around. After a quarter of an hour the bird perched again in front of me…
It defended that particular tree vigorously from Common Buzzards and showed clear territorial behaviour like wing-flapping, calling and so. The tree is situated between a large plough land and a grassland mosaic and it is in 200-meter distance from the nearest shelterbelt.
Unfortunately, in December 2007 I found an electrocuted LL Buzzard less than one kilometre from this site. Since then sometimes I have observed two wintering LLBs together there. There is an image of a full adult female in the LLB gallery showing the moment when a Common Buzzard attacked her.
This was a very nice experience, hope you will like the images!
Wishing you such great moments.
Regards, András
